wccp questions

[danletkeman]

Hello,

I'm interested in setting up a wccp squid proxy and connecting it to a 2801 router. I have it registered on the router as a wccp device.

If the cache server goes down will all http requests be dead, or will the requests just bypass the wccp redirect?

Does the caching server need to be in transparent mode?

Thanks,

Dan.

[pinkheart]

if the squid server goes down or the the server cable unplugged the http request will work fine ( the router will ignore the cache ) but if the squid service stopped ( the gre tunnel still there) the router will not be able to know that.

I think it make sense to use wccp with transparent caching as if you don't want to use transparent cache you don't have to use wccp .

[danletkeman]

Thanks for the quick response.

If I have multiple squid cache's connected to the same router and one of the cache's goes down completely it will automatically fail over to the next one, but you were saying that if the squid service is stopped it will still try to make requests to that caching server because it still has a gre tunnel to it. Is that still true if you have more than one caching server? eg if the service is stopped on one caching server will the router still try to make requests to it or does it know its down and then route all of the requests to the second caching server?

Also, my question about transparent cache was not quite clear. By default squid is not in transparent mode, i think it uses port 3128 or something, can i redirect the http requests to that port using wccp?

Thanks,

Dan.

[pinkheart]

well I don't think the router will know if squid stop if you have one cache or more ( but I am not sure , I used it with one cache only )

for the transparent caching you can redirect port 80 to 3128 using linux iptables as follows :

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3128

for more examples take a look at the following site

http://wiki.squid-cache.org/ConfigExamples